I’ve been thinking a little bit about motivation these past few days, which has also led me to do some noodling on values. This horrible train wreck of a thought process started because I’ve been re-reading Covey’s 7 Habits, and I’ve noticed one big difference between his and Allen’s approach: Covey wants us to start our self improvement with “the end in mind” whereas Allen just wants us to start.

On the surface of it, Covey’s approach feels right, but in reality, Allen’s approach is much more practical: how can you really know what your end you want unless you clear away all of the clutter in your life and better manage the many demands on your time? You can’t.

But why would you start any kind of self improvement program if you didn’t have a goal you wanted to achieve? My answer: motivation. It’s not as solid as a goal or as daunting as defining a goal. It’s squishy. Nebulous. Abstract. Motivations are the desires that spur us to better or worsen our situation. Some examples:

• I want to be happier
• I need to get better organized
• I need to spend more time with my family
• I want to be a better person

A motivation alone is a great deal of sound and fury that amounts to nothing, but it’s enough to get us started. People who start a diet or exercise program are motivated: They want to lose weight or be healthy. But what happens when that motivation is gone and they haven’t built any self-discipline on top of that motivation? They fall of their diet, stop going to the gym, and gain back the three pounds that they just lost.

Unless you build on your motivation, you will fail because motivation means nothing: You want to be healthy? Great, but it takes more than desire.

This is where I began 6 months ago: I wanted to better manage my time. I didn’t have any real goals in mind. I just wanted to be more productive at work so that I would have more time to spend with my family and do other things that I was passionate about.

But then, of course, I had to ask myself: what drove me to be motivated? (Tell me you saw that question coming.) That’s when I started thinking about values. (Told you it was a bit of a train wreck ;))

Values are the qualities or traits and beliefs that we prize in ourselves. They determine how we perceive reality. Some values we hold at the core of our being and changing them would be like making the sun rise in the west. Other values change on a daily basis. Some even on an hourly basis.

Our values determine our motivation. If we see ourselves as a victim, our values limit our motivation. Nothing we do will matter, so why bother. But, if we view the world as a “ours for the taking”, we will be motivated to improve our current situation. Our values may severly limit us, but they also set us free.

As you can see, Values and Motivations are closely tied together. If I believe that I can become rich, then I may be motivated to become rich—if becoming rich is something I would want based on my other values. However, if I think that I am not someone who could ever be rich, I will never be motivated to act on becoming rich.

I’m not sure how this fits in with my doodle from a couple weeks ago, but I am certainly noodling on it.

Resistance is fear. But Resistance is too cunning to show itself naked in this form. Why? Because if Resistance lets us see clearly that our own fear is preventing us from doing our work, we may feel shame at this. And shame may drive us to act in the face of fear.

What’s particularly insidious about rationalizations that Resistance presents to us is that a lot of them are true. They’re legitimate. Our wife may really be in her eight month of pregnancy; she may in truth need us at home. Our department may really be instituting a changeover that will eat up hours of our time. Indeed it may make sense to put off finishing our dissertation, at least till after the baby’s born. What Resistance leaves out, of course, is that all this means diddly. Tolstoy had thirteen kids and wrote War and Peace. Lance Armstrong had cancer and won the Tour de France three years and counting.

I’m keenly aware of the Principle of Priority, which states (a) you must know the difference between what is urgent and what is important, and (b) you must do what is important first.

The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.

I read Think like a Billionaire by Donald Trump over the weekend.

I have always enjoyed Trump’s books—their short reads with short chapters, and while they lack depth, they (usually) have plenty of little morsels (not quite enough to call food) for thought. Besides, it’s always interesting to hear a billionaire’s perspective—after all, he did something right.

This book, though, just fell flat. I guess I was expecting more interesting insight into the billionaire mind, and there wasn’t much in there that I hadn’t already heard elsewhere. In fact, the ideas in the book were so redundant with other books about success, I found only two take-aways—and they were both given in the same chapter:

• “Expect the shit to hit the fan everday” and you’ll always be ready.
• “Always pretend that you’re working for yourself.”

The two hours I spent reading the book weren’t completely wasted, though. After all, it’s encouraging to think that, before even reading the book, I had all the knowledge needed to become a billionaire. Now, I just need to get off my ass and put that knowledge to work.